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Emily Dickinson's Poems

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Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of Emily Dickinson is the message which her poems convey. Dickinson is an artist with words: she has the capability to display her philosophy using metaphors and allusions throughout her poems. Despite never marrying, Dickinson held strong views about marriage. She saw marriage as a barrier, that marriage often ended parts of womanhood for the bride. Never the less, it is best to analyze Dickinson’s poem about marriage and love through a feminist perspective to best understand her philosophy about marriage.

In the poem “I Gave Myself To Him,” Dickinson begins with:

I gave myself to him,
And took himself for pay.
The solemn contract of a life
Was ratified this way. (1-4)

The opening stanza gives …show more content…

The poem is written from a young girl's point of view, who is transitioning from girlhood to adulthood by marriage. The speaker put the words “wife” (1) and “woman” (3) in quotes, most likely to indicate that she has little clue about their actual meaning. The speaker, however, did not put the word Czar in quotes, but she is comparing being Czar to being a woman. A Czar is defined as a person appointed to govern a certain subject, the speaker could be making a metaphor about being a woman and a wife in a marriage is like being a Czar: there are aspects of life which she needs to govern alongside with her husband. When the speaker writes “I've finished that – / That other state” (1-2), the other state referred could be girlhood, and thus it can be interpreted that the speaker believes that her girlhood ended simply by marriage. In the next stanza, the speaker makes a metaphor referring marriage to an eclipse, the speaker writes: "How odd the Girl's life looks / Behind this soft Eclipse!" (5-6). The cryptic reference to an eclipse could be deciphered as Emily …show more content…

The speaker also refers herself to be “Empress of Calvary” (6), Calvary in this context is a location -as evident by the capitalization of the word- the location which Jesus Christ was crucified. By referring to herself as "Empress of Calvary" (6), the speaker sees the religious aspect of marriage, but instead of the good aspect of religion, she feels as if her marriage is holy, but she is suffering as well. Later in the poem, the speaker

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Whitman and Dickinson share the theme of death in their work, while Whitman decides to speak of death in a more realistic point of view, Dickinson speaks of the theme in a more conceptual one. In Whitman’s poems, he likes to have a more empathic view of individuals and their ways of living. For example, in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, the poet talks about not just of himself, but all human beings, and of how mankind works into the world and the life of it. Even though the poem mostly talks about life and the happiness of it, Whitman describes also that life itself has its ending, and that is the theme of death. For Dickinson, she is the complete opposite of happiness.

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The poem begins as a cry to God which directly resembles the Jews cry for help during their suffering. The line “ Where is God now? Shows the unimaginable suffering they are going through, since they are very religious, they would only question God’s intent if they are truly on the verge of biblical hell. The quote “The idea of

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